Interstitial society is (my definition -- I made it up) that which exists in the gaps and slippages of structured and recognized society. They are usually feral, meaning that they have returned close to their origins in pre-domestic times. Cats, dogs, escaped pet parakeets and snakes all slide through the spaces and darknesses of our cities, just as do their human counterparts: drug dealers, whores, illegal immigrants, and cast-off children. I’m thinking of this because of watching “The Wire,” the law-and-order series based in Baltimore that is really a continuation of “Homicide,” which was “domesticated” by network television until it managed to become more feral on HBO. God only knows what it would be like on Starz.
In many ways it’s an extension of good old “Hill Street Blues” which I loved very much because it was like Multnomah County Animal Control where I worked 1973-78, becoming imprinted forever with ferality even in its human form. (The sergeant who cautions, “Be careful out there!” was eerily like my boss, Mike Burgwin.) I already had some acquaintance with rural ferals from the Blackfeet reservation 1961-1973. Parts of society who are pushed up against the interstitial layers and players become very much like them out of the necessity of understanding and to some extent suppressing them. Interstitials cannot be eliminated. They are a vital contribution to moving laws closer to justice, society closer to love.
In fact, no one REALLY wants to eliminate them, though it would be good to think someone could get rid of the Fat Cat chickenhawks who trolled downtown Portland for little boys. Or find some way to extract the abused pets, women and children from the domination of gone-wild men we encountered daily. To some extent the purpose and source of interstitial society is that it lubricates, deflates, and enables things that society wants to happen but doesn’t want to admit any responsibility for tolerating. “The Wire” confronts -- or at least overhears -- this schism between what is happening and the hypocrisy of those who pretend to be against it. I suppose such TV shows hope to “clue in” the people out there who think it is fantasy and that it doesn’t exist where they are.
I always like the bad guys best, in this case Omar, with his bony ebony face bisected by a razor scar from hairline to jaw that the actor got in his own early interstitial life. He is a tragic figure, a gunslinger who falls in love, a ruthless man capable of intimacy. He walks the night hooded like a hawk. (Hey, remember Hawk? And other solitary, potent, law-unto-themselves figures like Miles Davis or Seal, whom Michael K. Williams (“Omar”) claims as a role model. Black works for these parts -- not just the hats.) And Bubbles -- he makes me think of Belker on “Hill Street Blues.” A crazy guy who isn’t crazy.
Snitches, spies, double-agents, conciliators -- and in some cases religious figures who are exempted from control like chaplains or hermits -- all live between the structures of both mainstream and crime. This is where I’d place the shaman, who has a different kind of power than either society or criminals. The shaman belongs to himself. He’s not always a nice guy -- the one I Iike best as a example is the shaman/witch/brujo played by Erik Schweig jangling with old-fashioned daguerreotypes, dripping poison. He’s evil -- enjoys and uses the power of it. An antidote to the kindly grandpa healer some imagine, that shaman in a shawl they come around here looking for.
Interstitial people are creatures of the dark both by choice and because of the dangerous stigma they wear, which gives society permission to punish, exclude, imprison, and even kill them. Their defense is to use the forces of darkness and the underground, in order both to be invisible and to defend themselves. Harry Potter knew. But this does not mean they are mean or idly destructive. Nor does it mean they are stupid or heartless, which is the great strength of “The Wireless.” They just see more.
We are in a time of transition, ambiguity, and contradiction which puts even more weight on the interstitial people. Greed is frakking society. In their attempts to create and enforce order, those in power are likely to proceed by elimination, taking down the safety nets in order to save money and canceling any means to join the system. Many will die. Have died. The status quo is at war against the forces for change and both try to enlist the disguised interstitials, who may be cab-drivers or artists or scriptwriters. Or shamans of some sort. We’ve been here before, but not quite on this scale. And there has never been quite the richness available, spilling from the sides of the cornucopia of exploitation, enabling subterranean lives everywhere. Polylingual, nomadic, online, connected, hooked on music if nothing else -- they give great story.
More than that, we are in a cold, detached, “quant” world where families are immolated by remote-controlled predator drones operated by some cleancut kid in Indiana, who then goes out for burgers and beer with his buds. This is a world where meds on which lives depend are withheld to control the client nations. And the meds and procedures your own doctor prescribes are predetermined by an insurance company referring to statistical likelihood of outcomes. Even if all the churches now want you to “pass the peace” and give each other hugs, it is not enough. We’ve learned to step over and “not see.”
But interstitial people are often hands-on, even belly-to-belly if not belly to back or engaged in (ahem) oral resuscitation. They are human, they have secretions and smells, they have voices and eyes that they know how to use -- even if they DO need to be paid. The more they tell us about being human, the better, even if we don’t want to hear it.
In this first season of “The Wire,” the team is working in the basement, bureaucratic catacombs. The pictures on the cave wall are not aurochs and spotted horses, but the footprints on this cement floor -- like the ones on the dusty beds of paleolithic caves -- include women and children (called “shorties” in Baltimore), where the controlling protocols are ceremonies of getting convictions: observation, notation, recordings, photographs, patterns and codes. Sedimentary evidence. Violence and sex somehow well up in the interstices.
Michael Winkelman would be disappointed that there is no acknowledgment of the religion that goes unrecognized here. I wish I could remember the name of the inner-city church series that was briefly on the air in the Seventies before the status quo killed it. Maybe Starz could revive it. The might call it “The Shaman”, who would be a guy who lived in a cardboard box on the steps.
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